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The Pacific Northwest continues to grapple with a fourth wave of cases that s filled hospitals in metro Seattle and Portland. (
NPR)
As of Wednesday at 8:00 a.m. EDT, the unofficial U.S. COVID-19 toll reached 32,779,414 cases and 582,848 deaths, increases of 34,943 and 686, respectively, since this time yesterday.
CDC records show 58.5% of U.S. adults have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine and 44.7% are fully vaccinated. For people over 65, those figures are 83.8% and 71.6%.
Beaches, schools, camps: with the school year ending soon, health officials race to figure out how to vaccinate younger teens.
Image Credit: BrainGate
A man paralyzed from the neck down used an implanted sensor that processed his brain signals to create text, achieving a typing speed rivaling that of his able-bodied peers.
The intracortical brain-computer interface (BCI) decoded his attempted handwriting movements from neural activity and translated them to text in real time at a rate of 90 characters per minute, more than double the previous record for typing with a BCI, reported Francis Willett, PhD, of Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Stanford University, and co-authors in
.
The 65-year-old man, referred to as T5 in the paper, had a spinal cord injury in 2007 that immobilized his limbs. Nine years later, as part of the BrainGate2 clinical trial, researchers placed two BCI chips, each the size of baby aspirin, in the part of his motor cortex that governs hand movement.
The Washington Post interviews researchers about recent studies.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine coordinated an initiative with the American Academy of Neurology and others to respond to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality s draft assessment questioning CPAP s long-term clinical benefits.
Repetitive head hits caused chronic synaptic adaptation and long-term cognitive impairment in mice. (Nature Communications)
In 2020, 24.6% of teens reported at least one diagnosed concussion in their lifetime, up from 19.5% in 2016.
(JAMA)
Researchers identified genetic drivers and a polygenic score for predicting progression to dementia in Parkinson s disease.
(Nature Genetics)
About one in four people with Parkinson s had enlarged fasting gallbladder volume, a small study showed.
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A third of elderly people with severe dementia and atrial fibrillation received an anticoagulant drug during the last 6 months of their life, an analysis of Medicare patients showed.
Nursing home length of stay and not having Medicaid were more strongly associated with anticoagulant use compared with stroke risk (CHA
2-VASc score), reported Gregory Ouellet, MD, MHS, of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and co-authors.
Greater bleeding risk (ATRIA score) was also associated with greater odds of anticoagulant use, they noted in a Anticoagulants are often continued in patients with atrial fibrillation even when they have advanced dementia, profound cognitive and functional impairments, and limited life expectancy, Ouellet said.
How do you define Alzheimer s disease?
The International Working Group (IWG) argued that for everyday clinical use, a biological definition alone the basis of the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer s Association (NIA-AA) framework is not enough.
Cognitively unimpaired individuals can have biomarker evidence of both amyloid beta and tau pathology but may not develop clinical signs of Alzheimer s disease in their lifetime, said Bruno Dubois, MD, of Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris in France, and a group of 19 other IWG physicians. Furthermore, a positive Alzheimer s disease pattern of biomarkers can be observed in other brain diseases in which Alzheimer s disease pathology is present as a comorbidity, the team wrote in the